i’ll celebrate my ten year high school reunion this year and even as i type those words i’m still beyond belief that a decade has passed since my time as a santa fe eagle. while some may fear said pending party, i’m actually looking forward to it -if nothing more than to perform a choreographed dance routine to cyndi lauper’s “time after time” with my best friend a la romy and michele’s high school reunion.

i mean, kidding, who knows if they’ll even have a dance floor at the shindig.

it’s ironic, really, that this year in particular marks our tenth anniversary of high school graduation, for i can’t help but to feel as though these past four months alone have lent themselves to a collection of mini reunions. a coffee date here, a “hey, my new fiance and i are in town for a weekend, let’s all get together” dinner there. an exchange of stories, the filing in of the blanks that instagram and facebook couldn’t quite fulfill. and through these exchanges i’ve realized something -that while our paths have diverged over the passage of ten years’ time, there remains a common thread.

we are still more alike than we are different.

and i think that’s the beauty of being a twentysomething -we’re all in this together -this crazy, roller coaster of highs and lows on the journey toward self-discovery. we can spend weeks, months, years apart because in the absence, a tiny part of us knows that when we come back together, if we are ever lucky enough reunite, we’ll still share this intangible bond, even ten years later.

we live these separate lives, different collegiate experiences in different cities with different people of whom to share them with. our first moments in the so-called real world may even take us further from each other in distance and in mind. we love and lose, experience overwhelming highs and debilitating lows. so much transpires over the course of our time away and yet when we start to unfold our stories for one another, the shocking discovery isn’t in their opposition, but rather, in their striking similarities. as if we had been living in a parallel continuum, destined to be reunited when our paths converged once more.

we are the same as we always were, but also very different. we are more self-aware, slower to judgment and preconceptions. we empathize and sympathize, for time has allowed us to metamorphosize. we are compassionate and understanding. or at least we try to be. we allow the walls that guarded us for so long to come down, and offer up full transparency (well, maybe not full transparency, but you know what i mean). 

this is who i am, this is who and what i’ve come to be.

sure, everyone wants to put their best foot forward, but at least in my own experiences, i have found that my peers are just as willing to share the ugly parts of their past as they are to boast about their accolades. and well, i just think that’s pretty neat.

so here’s to the class of 2003. for who we were back then, and who we are today, and for the roads that each of us has traveled to connect the dots. while i may not have a choreographed dance routine to perform for y’all, come autumn, i am very much looking forward to relaying my story of how i invented post-its.

am i more of a romy or a michele?